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Post by VectorX on Oct 20, 2018 22:25:53 GMT -5
Just went to that today. It was somewhat better than last year's, as it had its biggest amount of games yet, being like 350, which is insane. Although I still had fun last year, it was disappointing due to how commercial its gotten, as it had a lot of vendors that had nothing to do with gaming. Granted, those shows are expensive to do, but along with that, game after game after game I went up to (at only about 12:30 p. m.) were supposed to be on free play, yet they only had like two credits left. That was annoying, although it happens, but it really seemed to be bad with that show. There were also literally like 20 no-shows that year (like arcade Berzerk, which I wanted to play). Several games were also too easy: ever play a single game of Galaxian for half an hour? Right: it started with five ships. That went on for too long. Tempest also gave you I think five ships with extras every 10,000. So, this year was the biggest yet. I've yet to go over the huge list to see what games didn't make it, although I DO know the blasted Vectrex with VECTOR PATROL didn't make it, which was annoying. I really wanted to play that (only just played Vector Pilot at last year's expo). Then...SPACE FURY! Hadn't played that since back in the day! Um, the fire button wasn't working as quickly as it should've; dammit. I got all the shells docked with in the right order as a guess though. Star Trek was also two games over. You barely turned the spinner knob and the Enterprise spun all the way around; WHAT IS THIS SH*T?! Good grief. Black Widow was also there, along with a SUPERB Omega Race cockpit cab; holy crap! Even though I played O. Race in many an arcade I'd never played this version. AGAIN the spinner was off/too sensitive but everything else looked great. You'll see the picture later, but the display was so monstrously crisp and clean it must've been restored, as it looked brand new. I'll put up pics and get more into this later, but I'll just close with this: is anyone familiar with the Harp Twins? They played a concert there. It was really superb. I have a cd by an artist named Kate Price who played the hammer dulcimer (an ancient string instrument) and their performance sounded almost as mystic, even though they were mostly covers, but I never knew there was such a thing as an electric harp. That's what they play. Off to work on the pictures
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Post by VectorX on Oct 21, 2018 20:36:27 GMT -5
Ok, the follow-up... Good thing two Zaxxons were brought along, as the first one was screwed up, controller-wise. Luckily the second one wasn't, as I made it to and destroyed two of the robot bosses (Zaxxon itself? I don't recall), which I could do pretty much from back in the day. However, the control panel was lifting up when you moved up; argh. Kick Man, which I also haven't played since back in the day, was also out of order, along with some pinball game, and the Space Invaders pinball machine was bad ass looking, but as they say that you can't go home again, would I still like it as much as back then, or did it just *look* good? It had been at past expos, but I kept on missing it. Some guy was down to his last two balls or so so I was going to wait...and then the blasted ball he was on got stuck. Un-freaking-believable. We shook the table and I even lifted it up several inches off the floor once he started to walk off, but nope, it was stuck for good. (And on a side note, at one point I bent down today and had a really painful twinge in my back. I think that was the start of it yesterday when I lifted that table [although slightly leaning forward while playing a bit of pinball also might've contributed to that], then that was the final straw. I took a bath rather than a shower and used a heating pad on it several times but luckily it wasn't bad and didn't take long for the pain to go away. Kind of funny though.) Another game that was on the too easy setting was Frenzy. It kept on making this sound over and over again that I couldn't figure out what the deal was for a while. Then I noticed I had a crapload of men. It was set to give you an extra one every 1,000 points. That's way too many. I just walked off and left it after a while. Good grief. Raise that to 5,000 and I think that would've been ok. The start button to Sprint was missing, as someone might've pressed it and it fell to through to the floor or something, as there was no way to start a game. There was either another Sprint there or a similar racing game (forget which), so it was fun and challenging to play that (hadn't played that game in probably 35 years!). And I seemed to have a curse when I tried to get pictures of vector games, as shots with Star Trek/Space Fury, the Omega Race cab (it was a vector multi that was at last year's show, not the cockpit one) and Major Havoc all came out blurry; argh. Unbelievable again, but then, the camera's over 20 years old now. On the flip side though, I attended my first ever gaming-related lecture, being Brian Collin, who was behind the art of Pigskin Footbrawl, Rampage, Xenophobe (got to play for the first time in years too ) and many other games. He was pretty funny and personable and as he said later when I got a photo of him that he "liked to talk" about the gaming industry and all. And as I mentioned before the Harp Twins were really good. Pics can be seen here, just scroll down for them. Yeah I know, it still says "H. A. A. G. 2017" in the infobox, which I'll fix, along with the caption of Tempest (it should read it's with Super Pac-Man [another game that didn't work!], as I couldn't really crop the pic without it looking odd and forgot about the caption). I'll fix that stuff once I do the actual article at some point. So have fun for now. And speaking of which, it was still a fairly decent show, starting with my first walking in and finding a guy ending his game of Wizard of Wor. I then asked if he wanted to play doubles, which we got pretty far. So that was fun. And I'll end with a shouty welcome to arenafoot , or Brian, who TrekMD might know as the author of two Atari 2600 homebrew books (not real familiar with the scene since all I have is Skeleton+ myself, as I know the Vectrex homebrew scene a lot better), who got an account on here after I gave him a card with this forum's address on it since he was asking if I had Facebook or anything, as we know each other from High Score but kept on missing each other for years (due to my bad luck and missing five years' worth of shows, then when I finally went back last year he wasn't there! Bah ha ha).
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Post by arenafoot on Oct 22, 2018 20:05:44 GMT -5
VectorX - thanks for the shout out and the welcome here! I almost thought I left your card at the booth, but luckily I found it! I did book signings at The Game Czar booth, as both volumes of my "The Atari 2600 Homebrew Companion" book were sold there. They were also sold the same weekend at Portland Retro Gaming Expo (PRGE) at the AtariAge booth.
To bad you didn't come friday night at 8:30pm for the guest speaker Ed Fries formerly of Microsoft and creator of Halo 2600 for the Atari VCS/2600. I'm in the process of uploading it to YouTube currently. After his talk, we took a few group pictures of everyone who was there (Ed, Darrell Spice Jr., Joe Grisaffi, Brock Keaghey, "sramirez2008" from the AA forums & myself). I personally thought it was an awesome night!!
The Brian Colin session was great too! I never had met him, nor did I know anything about his past work and his story. He did a great job too! And Darrell Spice Jr.'s homebrew session was awesome as usual with info on how to write these homebrew games for the Atari.
It was nice to finally meet up with you Darryl! Can't wait til next years!!
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Post by VectorX on Oct 22, 2018 20:24:30 GMT -5
VectorX - thanks for the shout out and the welcome here! You're welcome, and thanks for joining! They were also sold the same weekend at Portland Retro Gaming Expo (PRGE) at the AtariAge booth. Does Albert still head those? He has been at several H. A. A. G. shows but he doesn't make every single one. To bad you didn't come friday night at 8:30pm for the guest speaker Ed Fries formerly of Microsoft and creator of Halo 2600 for the Atari VCS/2600. Well I might not be familiar with much of his stuff. But I could only get out one day anyway, so I had to go with the day with the longer hours. After his talk, we took a few group pictures of everyone who was there (Ed, Darrell Spice Jr., Joe Grisaffi, Brock Keaghey, "sramirez2008" from the AA forums & myself). I personally thought it was an awesome night!! That's pretty cool indeed! I've talked with Joe several times, including on Saturday, and he pointed you out to me, as you said you'd be one of the first few booths when you first come in the door. However, I was just looking for books and didn't see them and stupidly didn't write down the name of your company, which I was afraid I was going to miss you AGAIN. But luckily Joe knows who you are. The Brian Colin session was great too! I never had met him, nor did I know anything about his past work and his story. Same here, just Xenophobe and I played Rampage on my Sega Master System that I had for a whole 15 minutes before I sold it for my Genesis (although as he stated he had nothing to do with the ports. I was always kind of interested in General Chaos, so I guess I need to get that too!). He seems pretty nice and personable and with the pic of him on the wiki stub he just held that smile for what must've been for 20-30 seconds, because for some reason when I was trying to get a photo of him and his booth a ton of people suddenly started filing through for no reason! (It's not like a seminar had just let out because it was right after the Harp Twins concert and the room had already emptied!) I thought so as well, especially with filling in the missing dialog for when his game presentation didn't have any sound due to a missing audio cable or something with his setup, ha ha. And Darrell Spice Jr.'s homebrew session was awesome as usual with info on how to write these homebrew games for the Atari. Does he use Batari Basic or anything? Original 2600 programming's really hard. It was nice to finally meet up with you Darryl! Can't wait til next years!! Thanks, and same with you!
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Post by arenafoot on Oct 22, 2018 20:39:05 GMT -5
Does Albert still head those? He has been at several H. A. A. G. shows but he doesn't make every single one. Albert has gone to PRGE the last 2 years with new Atari homebrew releases. If this year and last years Houston expo being the same weekend as PRGE, he can't do both of them anymore. He might be skipping next years PRGE (if what I heard), so there's a chance of him setting up to sell at HAAG 2019! Oh wow cool! Yeah I've known Joe since the 2013 HAAG expo. Does he use Batari Basic or anything? Original 2600 programming's really hard. He shows you how the Atari displays the code onto the screen and what you can do with it. Not really constraining on bB or assembly.
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Post by VectorX on Oct 22, 2018 20:53:54 GMT -5
Albert has gone to PRGE the last 2 years with new Atari homebrew releases. If this year and last years Houston expo being the same weekend as PRGE, he can't do both of them anymore. Yeah I remember that happening and realizing that's why he couldn't come here. Oh well. He might be skipping next years PRGE (if what I heard), so there's a chance of him setting up to sell at HAAG 2019! Be nice to get 'im back But then any vendor is welcome, of course. Oh wow cool! Yeah I've known Joe since the 2013 HAAG expo. I won Laughing Boy as a door prize and that's how I first knew of him. Can't remember which expo it was, as I'd have to go look, but it was a while back (since it was on vcs!). He's since provided some info to my arcade preservation and Vectrex wikis.
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Post by VectorX on Nov 14, 2019 13:33:32 GMT -5
That time of the year again here, which the following vector stuff is supposed to be there:
*Asteroids (coin-op) *Asteroids Deluxe *Space Duel *Star Castle *Star Trek *Star Wars *Tempest *Vectrex
Uggggh, BAD timing though! I pulled who knows how many muscles in my shoulder, neck and right arm on Monday when I slipped on the floor. I *think* it won't be that much of a problem playing while doped up on Advil, as for the first time in years and years I got a ticket for both days (tomorrow and Sat., and thanks to Trek on here for getting it for me when PayPal wasn't working until I paid him back for it). Oh well, we'll have to see.
And of course, there's tons more than the above; supposedly there will be 400 game units there (pinball, video and all kinds of MAME/additional various stuff, vendors, bands playing, merchandise, panelists, etc.).
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Post by VectorX on Nov 16, 2019 1:07:18 GMT -5
Just completed day 1 of the expo. TONS of photos, due to being given a new phone a few months ago. Might finally do a proper wiki page on it that I've always meant to do, having many more photos than I originally intended to show the scope of the shows, but couldn't do to lack of time, mostly. As far as the vector side goes, unfortunately Space Duel and Star Castle were no shows. I can live without the latter but S. Duel I haven't played in ages, which sucks. Major Havoc was out of commission (maybe it'll work tomorrow?). Star Trek seemed to have been sped up (?). Tempest is still set with extra lives every 10,000 points. Asteroids Deluxe was so faint it was hard to see what was going on! At least there was nothing wrong with Star Wars. Quantum (not listed on the site but it appeared) is more fun as a later game known as "Asteroid Cowboy", if you ask me Just played one blah game of it and that was it, just like back in the day. But, I also played the almighty VECTOR PATROL! Kristof really pulled out the stops on that one, such as the cutscenes for when you complete a level and make a record (I think). As far as non-vector stuff went, like with last year, Frenzy I walked away from because it was set on an extra life for every 1000 points! That's ridiculous! And last year Berzerk had no credits but this year it didn't work; argh. However, those are the gripes. I heard some of Atari Matt's set, along with a local band called Loaded Popcorn (Keith, the guy who has headed these expos from the beginning, handles vocals, which he can't really sing). Surprisingly though the band was decent enough, with a good guitarist but in the hard rock with a hint of grunge they’re not real original, nor memorable. They do silly arcade- and pinball-themed songs so it’s a bit of a niche audience there, although one song they incorporated an Elvis and Led Zeppelin riff and it worked out pretty decently. I didn't even realize the guy who built the scale Viper from the original Battlestar Galactica would be there! For $5 you get to climb in there and watch some clips on the monitor. You also get to put the helmet on that lights up. It's neat to see and the cover will open and close but you're not even in there for four minutes unless you just want to sit there and hang out. I was offered to come back as a Cylon tomorrow so I'll take him up on that, as I still have the wristband. Played a ton of games too, one of them was a homemade pinball machine with what looked like a neat wood finish (might not be real but who knows). Also nice playing the rare Joust pinball doubles with a guy when I first walked in there. A guy who stood flipping both fingers at Wizard of Wor for several seconds after his game ended...nah. Didn't bother asking. Well that's my report for now, just some bits and pieces in a blur that I need to check out photos for and all, as there was tons more.
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Post by VectorX on Nov 20, 2019 14:27:58 GMT -5
A bit of a read, but here's (mostly) the rest...pics and several vector surprises are at the end though! All right, as far as the *rest* of the expo went on Saturday, as far as the Battlestar Galactica guy went, he was wearing a full Cylon suit, complete with the red dot going across the face and one of those voice changer deals that made him sound like a Cylon when he talked (or maybe it was something rigged up internally with some phrases recorded). I meant to get a photo of him, as I was playing a nearby pinball game, but then someone dressed up as a Stormtrooper from the local 501st division (who dresses up as Star Wars characters and visit kids in hospitals and all) asked if I could take a picture of all of them with the Cylon, which was a pretty cool crossover, to say the least He had to show me how to work his phone since he was also fully dressed and couldn’t swipe it with gloves on! Then all these other people started taking pictures, so they disbanded once my game was over with (figures) and the guy took his Cylon helmet off. Forgot to ask him as well if he made that too. I also got my very first video game autograph as well Freaking EUGENE JARVIS, behind Defender, Robotron: 2084 and more, gave a speech. He was pretty funny and all. Originally I was planning on having him autograph an old Joystik magazine article I have but trying to lift up books from my case with a hurt shoulder wasn’t going to work (I did a quick search for it but it’d take longer and might’ve been a bit painful to do so than I wanted to try, but of course I’m all better and lifting things way better now, ha ha). But thanks again to TrekMD for giving me the idea, as I told him I knew he didn’t have anything to do with the ports, but Defender was one of my all-time favorite arcade games and the Williams' Arcade’s Greatest Hits is one of my favorite carts for the Genesis, so I had him sign on one of the Defender pages of the instruction book. Pretty damn cool. I forgot that Keith, the guy who created these expos, had trivia contests. So I went up to his booth as he started one (along with a bunch of other people wanting prizes), doing some easy ones here and there, like asking what was the first game to be designed by a woman, which all of us yelled “Centipede”! He said that “everyone got that one” and tossed out a bunch of what looked to be inflatable animals or something; I don’t know what they were. We did get stumped by a few, like the very first talking coin-op that no one got (no, not Berzerk, but King and Balloon). After several minutes I decided to leave, sauntering off to play something...then heard an interesting question in regards to the sequel to the Tron video game. Say what? Tron 2.0? Killer App? Then after thinking about it for a while, I remembered it was Discs of Tron; I think someone yelled it out several seconds after I got it myself, so I might’ve won something. Then Keith asked what the very first color video game was. Oh for God’s SAKES! Figures, AFTER I leave he asks something I knew. Nobody said anything. Really? Several seconds went by. I wasn’t playing anything yet. Maybe I should go back... “The very first ever color video game...” I got close enough and yelled it out. “Who said ‘Galaxian’?” So, I got a copy of The Smurfs video game in regards to the movie, for the Nintendo DS. Can’t say I have one of those. Probably isn’t worth much to sell but someone else might want it. I’m kind of curious about it though but that’s not going to make me go out and buy a DS though. Then later I came in during Consortium of Genius’s set. I had always been curious about them due to the name. I thought “they sound sort of like Rush” during whatever song they were playing, then they played TOM SAWYER. Right off the bat though the singer wasn’t as good as Geddy Lee, although I’ve heard people say over the years they don’t like Lee’s voice anyway, so it didn’t really fit. The rest was decent enough, and it’s one thing not to have Neil Peart on drums, but if you don’t have Alex on guitar either...well, let’s just say I had a quick smirk when the first guitar solo was skipped, but then the vocalist played the solo on his keyboard instead. So that was cool, and the guitarist did the second solo with only hitting one bad note, so it was a decent cover. Unfortunately that was the end right there, so I can’t really form an opinion on them! (I had gone home to eat dinner and then came back like the night before.) All else I’ll say is that they didn’t have a drummer, just a robot on a monitor behind them playing drums. They sounded real too, not like how horrible a lot of the drum machines have sounded since they were invented (but they have gotten a lot better over the years though). Well if you can make lights on a Christmas display match music that is playing on your house then I guess you can have a robot playing the drums too. Next was Clive Farrington, a member from the When in Rome band, although I didn’t really know about it until the end of his set either! Because what the deal is, one, they had some dj on as well and I just thought it was him (although I *thought* it was weird that he told people in the audience to sing along at times. What, to a pre-recorded song? Huh?). Also, games are split into two rooms, one being another one not far off but they’re closed off. I assume I was in there when Keith announced him so I wasn’t really paying attention until the last song when I walked near the stage area and saw him up there (whoops!). Sounded like decent Euro-synth music but I can’t really say. Then last was Radio Cult, which the name worried me. As you might’ve guesse, yeah, they’re a cover band mostly, opening up with “Walk Like an Egyptian”, although it seemed a bit odd to have someone doing co-vocals who was male, since the originators of the song were all female. At least the rhythm guitarist and singer in the band is female though. They also stated that they allow people to come up and play if they visited them in their booth first (something I never even read on the web site until this morning! Too bad, I could’ve smashed around on the drums for a tune or two). The local guy in the audience who did co-vocals to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” was pretty bad but others who played guitar and drums were way better (luckily). It was rather amusing but with them doing their two originals, they actually weren’t that great and it makes you wonder what they’ll be doing 10 years from now, as it’s odd that they’re good enough musicians (both guitarists with the drummer and bassist being more than adequate as well) to just be playing other peoples’ songs for the most part. And then finally, surprisingly (as hell!) there were THREE vector incidents that happened, TWO of which involved t-shirts! First was meeting Sam, the guy who owns several vector games, including the Star Trek, Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe. It was real lucky I ran into him because he was about to leave for lunch and then leave the expo a couple of hours later, as we had been wanting to meet for a while. It turned out Star Trek was running fast because it was running on a Pii device. He also had to replace all kinds of things on his Asteroids to get it to work at the last second (thought he’d fixed it at first, then smoke came pouring out of it [ack!], so he had to try more stuff) and he mentioned something being wrong with Deluxe (which I said I’d noticed the display was real faint). Then while waiting for Eugene Jarvis I spotted a guy wearing that t-shirt that crossed Asteroids with Star Wars, telling him I had never seen that shirt before in my entire life, then that was the second time I had seen that in the last few months (sort of like this one here). He said it combined his two favorite things, being Star Wars and Asteroids. He doesn’t have a Vectrex (yet) though, just the usual story of trying to get a decent one off of ebay without it costing a ton. Then finally, there was a guy in a SPIKE shirt. Yes, of the Vectrex! Had to talk to him! He said he didn’t know where it came from actually, someone just sent it to him so he doesn’t know which t-shirt company made it. He doesn’t have many of the original GCE games but a multicart, not even knowing what Vector Patrol is. When I told him it was Moon Patrol his face really lit up, as I told him where the Vectrex was that was running it. I’d like to know what he thought of it, as I was mostly in the main room (where most of the games were) and then I saw Eugene Jarvis a couple of hours later and never saw the guy again. Sounds like he has quite the gaming collection too, as he also has a MAME cab or something. I think he said his name was Aaron. You can see that awesome shirt here. So, you can see pictures of the expo here. I’ll upload over 20 more later. If I could get these questions answered too that would be great: 1. Under the “Coin operated video games” gallery, is that Mortal Kombat 10 or 11? 2. Under the “Compuers and consoles” gallery, is that Quake III or Duke Nukem 3D running on the photo with the three computers? I need to update these captions.
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Post by TrekMD on Nov 20, 2019 18:00:57 GMT -5
Really cool. I'll have to get to the pictures later. I'm on a cruise right now and the internet is slow as molasses. Loading pictures would take an eternity!
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Post by VectorX on Nov 20, 2019 18:09:03 GMT -5
That's a switch! I'd think most would look at the pictures first! (Under *normal* circumstances, that is.)
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Post by VectorX on Dec 10, 2019 23:55:40 GMT -5
Ok, the last of them! Once more...go here: vectrex.fandom.com/wiki/H._A._A._G._2019_expoScroll down to the very last gallery ("miscellaneous/related"), then click on the tabber that says "Additional photos", and wha-la, over two dozen more Whew...
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Post by arenafoot on Mar 10, 2020 12:20:52 GMT -5
Now with PRGE being moved up to August, and the possibility of AA not being in attendance for that one, there could be a chance that AA releases the homebrews at HAAG 2020 instead. I'm working on getting some Atari talent to HAAG for this years show that have never been to HAAG.
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Post by VectorX on Mar 10, 2020 12:40:59 GMT -5
I look forward to that
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Post by arenafoot on Mar 10, 2020 12:55:21 GMT -5
I look forward to that email sent Darryl......
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